I love spring

Everything is melting. We are down to about a 4 foot snowbank in front of the house. In a couple of weeks, we will be down to grass. Brown grass from last year, but soon the little green shoots will show their heads. I looked out the window the other day and saw the heart in the snowbank. I think that my neighbour thought that I was a little bit cracked when I ran outside and started to take pictures of the snowbank.
I have to say that there is one thing that I don't really like about spring. The sand that gets tracked in daily. Here in the land of ice and snow our sidewalks get plowed, sanded, and salted after every snow storm. Storm after storm. Sand layer after sand layer. When all of the ice and snow melt, you are left with a lot of sand. Which gets tracked in to my front hall. I suppose that I could save it to put in the sand box for the babe.


And do you remember the pyrex episode ?


Well, I did it again. This time it was rice in a pot on the back burner and I meant to turn on the front burner. One burnt pot of rice later, I decided to do something permanent about my "little problem" You can see my solution above. F stands for FRONT. B stands for BACK. It has been a few weeks and this new system is working for me.

You know who you are....

And now, another poem by that most wonderful of poets, Shel Silverstein.


Hector the Collector

Hector the Collector
Collected bits of string
Collected dolls with broken heads
And rusty bells that would not ring.
Pieces out of picture puzzles,
Bent-up nails and ice-cream sticks,
Twists of wire, worn out tires,
Paper bags and broken bricks.
Old chipped vases, half shoelaces,
Gatlin' guns that wouldn't shoot,
Leaky boats that wouldn't float
And stopped up horns that wouldn't toot.
Butter knives that had no handles,
Copper keys that fit no locks,
Rings that were too small for fingers,
Dried up leaves and patched up socks.
Worn-out belts that had no buckles,
'lectric trains that had no tracks,
Airplane models, broken bottles,
Three legged chairs and cups with cracks.
Hector the collector
Loved these things with all his soul-
Loved them more than shining diamonds ,
Loved them more than glistening gold.
Hector called to all the people,
Come and share my treasure trunk!"
And all the silly sightless people
Came and looked....and called it junk.

Internet and Yarn

These are my "Skeins of Many Colours". You know the little bit that is left over when you ply? I just kept adding them all together on one bobbin and then spun a neutral grey to ply it with. I think that they are going to be a scarf. But from now on, I'm going to make a ball and ply from both ends of the ballto finish the skein. These are interesting, but there is a lot of yarn on there that could have been in with my skeins. And now I know how to accomplish that.
This is my drunken mermaids dream. It is the finest that I have ever spun. Except for that fat part in the middle that happened one night over a bottle of wine.

And we are having problems with our Internet connection. It keeps timing out and dropping off of the radar. I am having problems sending e-mails. Some go out, some don't. And to look at anything takes for ever. So I have been missing all of your blogs for the past few days. IF I was smart enough to have added you all to my links list, then it would not be an issue. But as it is, I seem to have little time on the computer at home. Too much to do and the kids are actually starting to use it to do research for school projects. Finally! I have never seen any one so reluctant to go near a computer as Mira. And all Liam ever wanted to do was play games. But both of them have been actively using it as a tool.

There is hope yet.

And the Winner is....

Not my hands. My hand piece was rejected from the show because, according to the curator, he has seen too many hands. Hands are overdone. Unfortunately for me, I'm not done with hands, so hopefully, at some other time, I will be able to get a show of my hands. I have them in many different shapes, media, and sizes.

On a good note, my silk shawl was accepted. I have to admit that it is very pretty. When I was weaving it, I kept saying "prettyprettypretty" I was really happy with the way that it turned out. Can I show it to you? Nope. My bad. I didn't take a picture of it while I had it. Photos are being taken of it so that it can go in the catalogue of the show. I can hardly believe it. My shawl! In the Beaverbrook Art Gallery! This is a BIG DEAL for me! I didn't think that I would ever show anything there. Let's here it for the Canadian Year of Craft!

Unfortunately, I am almost out of the silk that I have been using. I have enough for maybe one more set of scarves. The supplier of that particular silk has retired and so I need to get a new one. And all the other silk suppliers are much more expensive than the Banisters were. They dealt mostly in mill ends so they were able to keep their prices down. As a result of my increased cost of supplies, my scarves are about to take a price hike.
I wonder how my sales will be effected.

St Patricks day storm

This is what I saw when I checked the weather this morning.

Tonight
Cloudy. Snow at times heavy beginning early this evening. Snow mixed with ice pellets overnight. Snow and ice pellet amount 15 cm. Blowing snow. Wind northeast 30 km/h gusting to 50. Low minus 8.
Saturday
Ice pellets changing to freezing rain late in the morning then to rain at times heavy in the afternoon. Ice pellet amount 2 cm. Rainfall amount 10 to 20 mm. Fog patches developing in the afternoon. Wind east 30 km/h gusting to 50 becoming southeast 40 gusting to 60 late in the morning. High 9.

Sigh. Spring ain't sprung yet.

for those of you....

that like to show your outdoor flowers at this time of year, (you know who you are), we here in the snowy (but melting) north have flowers too. They are just indoors. This is one of my Christmas cacti that decided to bloom this year.


I also have the well know fuchsia colour one as well a very pale pink one. I love it when they bloom. Also blooming in my house is a cyclamen that someone gave me sometime last year. Apparently they are suppose to bloom, then everything is suppose to die back, at which point you lift the bulb and put it somewhere cool and bring it out again later. Most people just chuck them. Well, my little cyclamen can't read because there has been one or two blooms on the thing since last fall at least. Right now there are four.

And for those of you who were wondering about my sear sucker scarf done with my hand spun, here it is. You can see the ripply edge on the right side of the picture. Not a bad scarf, but not gallery work.
And this is a bad photo of my wall. With all my family's hands.
I hope this piece is chosen.
And today, Mira is home sick, so most of the running around that Nicole and I do on Thursdays is not getting done, so I am trying a bit of an experiment. I have been putting all of my odd bits of singles hand spun ( you know, the bit on the second bobbin that is always left over) onto one bobbin and today I am plying it with a purpley/grey singles that I spun out of a batt that I carded when I was desperate to spin something, but only had my hand dyed samples for my class before Christmas. So far it looks.... interesting. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Sock Progress

It is now after 4:00 and I have just finished my last bunch of slides for today. I can now understand how some of you can knit socks so quickly. All it takes is time and the willingness to use that time to knit socks. As you can see, I have made great progress on my second sock. And I have now scanned over 450 slides. But not all today. Well over 100 today though. I think that it has been a good days work.

BusyBusyBusy

I have been working overtime trying to get a few things ready for the faculty show. The deadline has been extended one day and everything was due first thing this morning. I'd show you some pictures, but they are at home. I am at work right now waiting for some slides to scan so that I can digitize and label them. There are a lot of slides to get through and each one takes about two minutes to scan. So I have a bit of down time occasionally when there is not too much information on the slide to record.

Enter....The Socks. I'm working on an i-mac with a built in camera.
I used to sit and twiddle my thumbs occasionally for about 30 seconds between slides and it became old pretty quickly. So I decided to bring my knitting in and this is the progress that I have made in 30 second intervals between more than 300 slides. For the first time, I am knitting both sock at the same time to avoid the dreaded Second Sock Syndrome. You can see the humble beginnings of sock #2 hanging off of the needles of it's larger sister. So far so good. I have about a gazillion more slides to get through so I may finish the pair before the end of the year, which here occurs sometime in May. I doubt that I will get all of the slides done though.

But getting back to the reason that I have been absent from here for so long.... I have a felted wall piece, a dyed silk shawl, and a hand spun scarf. I had originally wanted to make a series of scarves with the hand spun but the second one I had a few tension issues. I decided to pair my hand spun with some mohair/silk blend that I dyed to match, and the mohair has no stretch to it what so ever where as the hand spun could be stretched about twice it's length. Some yarns just stretch more than others (as all of you knitters and weavers know) But when they are on a loom together, all of the yarns have to be under tension. I tried to compensate when I wound on and tied on, but apparently not enough. The finished scarf looks sort of a little like seersucker. Not what I was going for. So, to make a long story short, I have to do a bit more experimentation. I didn't feel that that scarf was something that I could show as my "best work", beautiful though it was.
I have also have a cold that has been keeping me awake at nights even though I am dog tired when I go to bed. Maybe I should just get up and blog!

Thanks for stopping by and I promise that I won't wait so long to wright again.

Tales of a drunken spinner

This is my mermaid dreams merino roving. I was going for fine and I think I have achieved maximum fineness. For me anyway. I didn't have much time to spin last week and so when the weekend presented itself, (wahoo!) I finished up the first bobbin and got started on the second.

This is where the 'drunken' part comes in. Bill decided to watch a couple of movies and open a bottle of wine. I decided to join him. Along with my spinning wheel. I propped my self up on the futon in our "home theatre" and there, with the wheel and the afore mentioned wine, we watched Indian Summer and The Notebook . We have seen these movies many times before and love them both. While watching a movie I've seen before, I can do things with my hands that don't require my full attention. I'm sure that you all know what I mean. I have progressed in my spinning to this point and so though that it would be fine to spin and watch. Multi-tasking is a thing that I do with moderate success. And to be honest with you, I think that I would have been OK if the wine hadn't have been involved. Or maybe the beer before supper. One of them anyway. Because when I woke up in the morning my first thought was "I wonder what my spinning looks like" After the movie, I was surprised to find out that it was almost midnight and well past my bedtime and quickly took myself off to bed, not giving a second thought to the fleece that I had massacred.

You can tell the end of the movie was holding my attention much more than the fleece (beautiful though she is) by the (ahem) slight unevenness of my bobbin. And those over spun parts. And the slightly thicker spots.

But on the bright side, I had been wondering how to spin unevenly like my first few skeins. And now I know. Just add wine.

Eye Candy

Hot off the loom. My first skeins of hand dyed, hand spun yarn. Now we can add handwoven to the mix. I'm loving the spinning. And weaving with this stuff is wonderful! I sett it at 8EPI sleyed in a 6 reed because of some slubs. The weft is a wool/silk blend that just disappears and lets the beauty of the yarn come through.
Next on the loom is a silk shawl. Warp dyed by me of course. As I was winding it on, I just kept saying "So Pretty! So Pretty!" I am pleased with it so far. It is all threaded and tied on. I just have to put in my warp spreader and header and I can start weaving. I hope to have it off the loom in a couple of days. It feels good to be weaving again. I had to take a bit of a break after the Christmas rush was over. And January and February are usually a bit hard for me. I just want to hibernate until spring is near. We had a couple of really nice days here and I am feeling more energetic than I have in a while. Come on spring and hurry up!

Saturday Chore

This is the view this morning outside my front door. Maybe later, when the coffee is finished and I'm feeling a little more energetic, I'll venture out and give you a view of what faces us in our drive way. My back aches just thinking about it. In case you haven't guessed, I have a camera for the weekend. I'll be running around snapping all sorts of things that I have been up to lately. Because I have been doing. Including weaving my first wheel spun skeins into a scarf! I am also working on a couple of things for a faculty show at the school. It is a curated exhibition, so I have no idea if what I submit will be chosen, but it won't be chosen if I don't submit anything. This year is "The Year Of Craft" and in honor of that, The Beaverbrook Art Gallery in town here is going to have an exhibition of the Craft College Faculty work. You may have heard of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery because it has been in the news lately.There is a court battle going on right now about the ownership of over 100 paintings worth millions of dollars. To make a long story short, the board of directors says that the paintings were donated to the province of New Brunswick by the late Lord Beaverbrook, and the current Lord Beaverbrook (the late LB's grandson) says that they have only been on loan and he wants them back so that he can sell them to raise some money to pay for repairs to his summer home. There is a lot more to it than that, but there is the story in a nut shell. You can guess who's side I'm on.

And do you remember The Pink Thing? We have found another way to wear it! It's like a fuzzy pink evening gown. If only they made one in my size!

What's for supper?

Me-Stew

I have nothing to put in my stew, you see,
Not a bone or a bean or a black-eyed pea,
So I'll just climb in the pot to see
If I can make stew out of me.
I'll put in some pepper and salt and I'll sit
In the bubbling water-I won't scream a bit.
I'll sing while I simmer,I'll smile while I'm stewing,
I'll taste myself often to see how I'm doing.
I'll stir myself round with this big wooden spoon
And serve myself up at a quarter to noon.
So bring out your stew bowls,
You gobblers and snackers.
Farewell-and I hope you enjoy me with crackers!

Courtesy of Shel Silverstein in Where The Sidewalk Ends.

This poem has great significance to me because this is just about how I feel right now. Like I've been boiled and served up. I just spent 2 hours mulling over the cook book selection in Chapters. Who knew that there were so many choices? I had a gift certificate to spend and Bill and I (it was a gift to both of us) decided that a cook book would be a good thing. I could have bought a book about spinning. Applaud my restraint. No wonder I rarely venture to the mall

Sign of spring

I just checked the weather page and for the first time in months, there is a UV index. I'm sure that this is no big deal to all you people in warm climates, but up here it is a cause to celebrate! Until I remember that when I was a kid there was no such thing as a UV index and it took all day at the beach to get a sun burn.

Melanie, if you check my profile, and click on the e-mail icon, you can e-mail me directly and I can sent you the info about our spinning group. Hope to hear from you.

I'm a leftie and never knew it!

Tonight was my spinning group meeting and while we were all there spinning, chatting, and what-not, one of the ladies asked if I was left handed. "No" was my reply, "Are you?" She was a right handed person too. As was everyone eles there. But I, apparently, was spinning left handed. ? I had actually tried to spin with the other (right) hand a few weeks ago when I was giving the wheel quite a work out and had a bit of cramping in my left hand and I just couldn't do it. How weird is that? My first though was to wonder if this was some sort of body memory from a past life. In my universe, almost anything is possible.

So now I'm wondering if any of you right handed people spin with your left hand? Or I suppose that if you are a leftie, do you spin with your right? Enquireing minds want to know!

Edit: When I say spin leftie, what I mean is that my left hand is closest to the wheel while my right is holding the bulk of the fiber.

Disappointment

Thanks for all your well wishes. Thankfully, we were not terribly hard hit by the flu. Not like the Sidney Fly from about 7 or 8 years ago. THAT was a bad flu. Bill was in bed for two weeks. He missed Christmas entirely. I was down for a week and brought the kids out to my moms house so that I could get a bit of rest. That was a BAD flu. We are almost all better now. Except for Nicole. She seems to go from being a bit better to feeling a bit worse. Maybe it's because the house is a little cool and she has an aversion to clothes. Her motto is "Naked is better when you are 3". Personally, I just keep putting on more sweaters these days. But it seems that we are coming out of the deep freeze now. Tomorrow is suppose to be hovering around freezing. You know that it has been cold when you look at the weather page and say"-10 this morning. That's not too bad."

My big disappointment came on Sunday. Sunday was actually a nice day. Little wind, sunny, just around freezing. I was feeling better and decided to go for a walk to gather up a few things for a green Thai curry that had been hovering in my mind for a few days. I walked up to the local independent Chinese grocery store (the Friendship Store) to pick up some coconut cream for the dish. Unfortunately they were closed on Sundays. Who knew? So I hiked down to the local independent grocery/meat store (Victory) to pick up a few other things to go into the dish and decided that I would give the Superstore a try for coconut cream. After searching the isles, I finally had to ask at the service desk if they had such a beast as coconut cream. " Yes" was the answer. I was told where to find it and find it I did. but it said "cream of
coconut" "Same diff" thinks I. Whoa. Was I wrong. Apparently the sh*t that they sell as "cream of coconut" is some foul concoction for making pina coladas. The first ingredient was sugar. A sad fact that I didn't find out until I opened the $4 can and saw the clear,thick liquid surrounding the mass of white chunks. In the end, my savoury, spicy curry dish was cloyingly sweet. So sweet, in fact, that Liam (aka Snack Snack Sugar Lips) said that it was too sweet. Lesson learned. I never though that I would be compelled to wash a curry dish, but I did. I put the mess in a
strainer and rinsed it. Yesterday on the way home from work, stopped at the local independent health food store (Aura), picked up some REAL coconut milk and tried it
again. The dish was still a bit sweeter than normal, but much better. And I am having the leftovers for lunch. Speaking of which, I'm hungry.

Happy Hump Day

Flu.

Ugh. So it has now hit everyone in the house except for Bill. It is also strange in how it effects everyone differently. It hit poor Simon the hardest. He was down for three days. He has just reported that he feel better.

Gotta go though. Small girl wants a book read. I'm hoping it is not one that I have memorized.

Why did I want snow?

Well, today was a snow day for myself and the kids. Bill had to go to
work for the afternoon. Wonders of wonders, the powers that be actually
cancelled university classes for the morning. Thank heavens. That meant
that Bill could help shovel before he had to go to work. We had snow
last night, followed by some rain and then we are being plunged back
into the deep freeze by late this afternoon. So there was no waiting
for later. It was hard to shovel the wet snow, but it would have been
impossible to shovel the solid frozen mass that it would all become.
Kora, from upstairs, came out and did her part too. It is so nice to
have neighbours who will help with the shoveling chores. We have had
several who wouldn't even shovel the front steps. Now I am slightly
sore and tired.
So I took one of those online tests. This one was
pointed out by Judy

Take the Quiz here!

I always liked Elinor. Although I don't think that I could live up to her example.

I hope to get some spinning done this evening. I've been a good girl and deserve a treat.

FYI

I thought that this was common knowledge. Why? I have no idea. Maybe because I have know about this strange reaction for years. My sister and I used to do this all the time when we were kids. Why? Again, no idea. Some things kids just DO. I feel sorry for a lot of kids these days. Some are so schedulized and watched and kept near that they have no time to explore and experiment like we did as kids. You know who you are. You are the ones who wouldn't want your kids to do what you did when you were a kid. I some days have to take a deep breath and let my kids go when we are at my parents house. They live on a farm and there are all sorts of potential dangers. But there are all sorts of learning opportunities too. We ran wild from June to September and I survived. The things that I have to worry about out there are inanimate and not living breathing beings. Some people are scary. To all of you scary people, I say "GO AWAY".
But enough of that. The funny reaction that I mentioned earlier was the simple fact that you can clean pennies (and any copper) of corrosion with ketchup.
It is science fair project time and Mira finally decided what her project was going to be. She had made a battery with zinc washers, pennies, lemon juice, and paper towel a couple of years ago with her papa and decided that this was what she would do for her project. Bill decided to bump up the demo (and at the same time make a piece of equipment that he may be able to use in his first year lab as a demo) and make a battery cell using copper plates and zinc flashing all soddered together in a battery type cell structure (in reality, a pill case). I was helping to clean the copper and zinc plates and Bill wanted me to sand all of the copper plates to clean them. "Why don't I just use ketchup?" I asked. Well, I'm not going to get into the discussion that followed, but let us say that the sceptic was soon converted. Converted to the point that he told a few people at work today about the wonders of ketchup on copper as a cleaning agent and they were all amazed! Who knew? Just one of those useless bits of childhood information that actually turned out to be useful.
Don't believe me? Just dump some ketchup on some dirty, scuzzy pennies. It only takes a minute and they look shiny and new. Did you know this? Or are we New Brunswick farm girls just weird?
And you though that ketchup was just for fries!

happy V-day

Happy Valentines Day all! I hope that it is a good one.
Today is a working day for me, so when I polled the kids last night at supper as to what they wanted to eat tonight for supper, I sadly had to shoot down Pizza and Lasagna. There were a few other dish ideas tossed out on the table, but the clear majority turned out to be pesto. And salad. That is for me. I feel that I need to chew on some crunchy green stuff to combat all of the cookies that I ate on Monday. This week is Teacher Appreciation week at the Boys elementary school and I had volunteered to do something or it. Bake cookies was the easiest thing, but it turned out not to be the wisest. Butterscotch chips and I get along too well.
I had recently been a part of a recipe swap hosted by Amanda and there are some tasty dishes there, but a lot of them take more prep time than I have between getting home from work and having supper on the table before the kids "die from starvation". But on the good side, tomorrow looks like it is going to be a snow day and I will have a bit more time to cook. 15 -20 cm of snow and then some rain in the morning. Rain! Can you believe it? After the deep freeze that we have been in all this time, it is going to rain. Global warming for you. The clouds must be able to retain a lot more heat than they used to.

Note to Self.....

When Pyrex says " from stove top to oven" the don't really mean it.

Yesterday was one of those rare days when Bill had to be downtown at lunch. After he did his business, he stopped at Victory and picked up a few things including Chicken breasts. He lovingly brought these home, chopped and diced and poured various thing on them and left them to marinate. So (joy and bliss) when I got home from work, supper preparations had begun. I still had to cook it, but the thinking part was done. Note: "the thinking part was done". Apparently it was really finished for the evening.
I decided to steam some carrots, put rice on, and make a onions-mushrooms-red pepper concoction. Sounds good? Hmmmm.
So I put the carrots on to steam. Turn the oven on to preheat. Move the glass dish that the chicken has been marinating in to the stove so I can pop it into the oven as soon as it gets up to temp.
Have I mentioned that we got a new stove a few months ago?
On my old stove, the top dials were the back burner and the bottom dials were the front. Makes a bit of sense. Right? On the new stove the dials are reversed. You would think that by now, I would be able to get it right. But no. I apparently turned the chicken in the glass pan on to steam, while the carrots sat there cold. I heard a "plip,plip,plip" and thought "that doesn't sound right". And sure enough, there was the chicken, in the glass pan, on a red hot burner, boiling. Oops. "No worries", thought I. And I popped it into the almost up to temp oven.
So far so good. And then.....
About 5 minutes later, I heard a loud shattering sound. Followed by hissing. Picture if you will screaming Jackie running to the oven, opening the door to make sure that it really is what I think it was ( duhhh, what else could it have been?) shutting the kitchen door, opening the back shed door to let out a bit of the smoke. And then proceeded to laugh my fool ass off. Have I mentioned how cold it has been lately? Well last night was no exception. After the smoke cleared a bit, I looked back in the oven to find the chicken, high and moist, sitting on the rack, while the marinade and a whole lot of glass sat on the bottom. What to do.
Well, in the end I did what any frugal person would have done. 6 chicken breasts does not come cheap, so I washed them, checked for broken glass, put them in a stainless steal pan, and cooked them on the stove top while I cleaned out the now cooled down oven.
Thankfully when Pyrex breaks, it doesn't break into shards, but shatters into chunks. And even more thankfully, it was in a contained space. Can you imagine the mess that it could have caused? And if any of the kids had been standing around, the results could have been much different.
It was delicious, by the way. And now my oven is clean. Sort of.
Have a happy weekend. I hope the sun is shining where you are.